Canada legalized assisted suicide and euthanasia in 2016 and originally included an eligibility criterion that there be a “reasonable foreseeability of natural death.” After that portion of the law was struck down by the country’s Supreme Court, the current law allows any consenting adult with “a serious and incurable illness, disease, or disability” in an “advanced state of irreversible decline in capability” to request assisted suicide.
Schadenberg noted that counting assisted suicide deaths using the WHO standard — in addition to obfuscating the person’s true cause of death — inflates the death rates from certain diseases, such as cancer, if more and more people are choosing to end their own lives prematurely after being diagnosed and cancer is subsequently listed as their cause of death. That throws off the data when doctors later attempt to determine a prognosis for future patients if the data show so many people apparently dying of cancer prematurely, he noted.
This reporting procedure causes further difficulty because, in the U.S., the doctor prescribing the lethal medication is rarely present at the point of the patient’s death, Schadenberg pointed out. The patient takes the drug on his or her own, usually at home.
Therefore, Schadenberg asserted, in states where assisted suicide is legal such as Oregon, the state often has no way to prove that a patient died from assisted suicide. The Oregon Department of Health has no authority nor budget given to them under law to investigate these cases. As a result, he said, assisted suicide is “mixed in” with all other causes of death.
“Transparency has been intentionally removed from the equation,” Schadenberg commented.
Schadenberg said he believes the decision to count MAID deaths this way is part of an effort to “normalize the concept of killing someone.”
This counting method leads to further problems in both the U.S. and Canada, including a skewing of overall suicide statistics, another advocate said.
Wesley J. Smith, a lawyer and a senior fellow at the U.S.-based Discovery Institute, told CNA that because of the way assisted suicides are counted in the states, the countrywide total number of suicides reported each year is likely an undercount — which is significant, given the fact that deaths by suicide grew to “the highest number ever recorded in U.S. history” in 2022.
“When states turn in their suicide statistics to the federal government, they don’t include assisted suicides as suicides,” Smith explained, noting that the states are reliant on doctors self-reporting how the patient died.
As a result, he said, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention almost certainly does not have a full, complete picture of how many people have committed suicide in the U.S. Echoing Schadenberg, Smith said he believes this counting practice is part of an effort by some pro-assisted suicide activists to redefine the practice as “not suicide,” and thus as more culturally acceptable.
He said because assisted suicide is a state issue in the U.S., the only way to undo this method of counting deaths is through the passing of state legislation, which he said is “incredibly unlikely.” That said, Smith said he believes disability rights activists in the U.S. have thus far managed to keep the worst practices of Canada’s MAID system from arriving in the States.
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‘Morally unacceptable’
Amid an expansion of the practice in 2021 that included the removal of several safeguards, the Canadian government said it would wait two years to extend assisted suicide and euthanasia to mentally ill citizens to study how it could be “safely” provided. The government earlier this year extended that delay by another year, meaning Canadians suffering from mental illnesses will be able to apply for assisted suicide by mid-March 2024. Numerous groups in Canada have expressed concern about the change.
Instead of assisted suicide or euthanasia the Catholic Church supports palliative care, which means accompanying patients toward the end of their lives with methods such as pain management and emotional and spiritual support, while not accelerating the process of death.
The Catholic bishops of Canada reiterated Nov. 28 that Catholic medical institutions cannot offer medical aid in dying (MAID) and promoted instead the expansion of palliative care practices.
“Euthanasia and assisted suicide (MAID) have always been, and will always be, morally unacceptable because they are affronts to human dignity and violations of natural and divine law. Catholic health care affirms that every person, made in the image of God (cf. Gn 1:26), has intrinsic value, regardless of ability or health,” the bishops wrote.
“For these reasons, we, the members of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, unanimously and unequivocally oppose the performance of either euthanasia or assisted suicide (MAID) within health organizations with a Catholic identity. We oppose any efforts by governments or others to compel such facilities to perform MAID in violation of Catholic teachings. Anything to the contrary would deeply betray the identity of these institutions as Catholic and would not be in keeping with the Church’s moral teachings on the sanctity of life and the dignity of the human person.”